Instead, he wished to produce “a substance or invent a machine of such frightful efficacy for wholesale destruction that wars should thereby become altogether impossible”.
You know, it does seem like maybe he was right here, sorta? Nuclear weapons do seem like the main reason why WW3 hasn’t happened yet.
That said, WW3 isn’t impossible, and if it were to happen nuclear weapons would make it much worse than all previous wars.
I didn’t want to cram any conclusion down the reader’s throat. But I think he was kinda right, yeah. They seem to have reduced war deaths substantially in our branch of the multiverse, so far. But as you say, they definitely have not made wars impossible as he predicted, and in fact now that we actually have those machines of frightful efficacy, it seems entirely possible that they will some day be used.
If World War III descends into a stalemate, leading the warring parties to attempt creating artificial general intelligence, or even deploying misaligned artificial general intelligence in desperation...
You know, it does seem like maybe he was right here, sorta? Nuclear weapons do seem like the main reason why WW3 hasn’t happened yet.
That said, WW3 isn’t impossible, and if it were to happen nuclear weapons would make it much worse than all previous wars.
I didn’t want to cram any conclusion down the reader’s throat. But I think he was kinda right, yeah. They seem to have reduced war deaths substantially in our branch of the multiverse, so far. But as you say, they definitely have not made wars impossible as he predicted, and in fact now that we actually have those machines of frightful efficacy, it seems entirely possible that they will some day be used.
If World War III descends into a stalemate, leading the warring parties to attempt creating artificial general intelligence, or even deploying misaligned artificial general intelligence in desperation...